Walking, talking charm factory

Wednesday 30 August 2000 23:00 BST

George Clooney can't sing. When he opens his mouth on stage as the lead singer of the faux hillbilly band, The Soggy Bottom Boys, in the Coen Brothers' latest film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, somebody else's voice emerges.

Not that anyone would have known if he hadn't come clean about it. The Coens, after all, are adept at playing games with the truth (remember the fuss over the 'true story' behind Fargo?) and would quite happily have engaged with Clooney in a little benign deception had he so wished. What's more, the voice that does emerge in perfect synchronicity with the actor's miming is extraordinarily like Clooney's. But honesty, he feels, is the best policy. It also provides him with the opportunity for a few laughs at his own expense.

'That is not me singing,' he says, almost before he's sat down. 'I just want you to know that. The first time I rehearsed the scene I thought I was singing pretty well. But there was a guy in a booth behind me who could really sing so he got the job. It was very humiliating.' He pauses for a moment's sympathy at a putative career nipped in the bud. 'I got Glenn Close to do all my lines as well...'

He's grinning now, knows he's got me on his side. Clooney may not be able to sing but that's the least of his worries. The man is a walking, talking charm factory. It's a gift not given to everyone and he works hard to wear it lightly.

It has taken a little time but George Clooney is now a bona fide movie star. The difference between being a big fish in the small pond of television and a confident swimmer in the shark-infested waters of Hollywood is greater than most people imagine. The credits of straight-to-video movies and HBO films of the week are littered with the names of those who didn't quite make it, who got chewed up by a merciless business.

Clooney, one feels, is fully aware of the vicissitudes of his profession. In a relatively brief career as a major movie actor, he has backed both winners and losers. Who now remembers One Fine Day? Who now can recall his character in The Peacemaker? Who would want to recollect his single outing as the Caped Crusader in Batman & Robin? Certainly not Clooney, though he occasionally alludes to the latter like a memento mori.

'Batman? You go on the publicity tour and you sit down and you have to look guys like you in the eye and dance around the subject when all you really want to say is that there is no script and that I wasn't any good in it. So I decided to get good scripts. It's a good time for me now so I can work on scripts for films that I would go and see.' He pauses, perhaps wondering if that remark sounds arrogant. 'I can die by my own stupidity. It's dying by other people's stupidity I object to. I wish I was smart enough to have a plan. But I don't. In a funny way, I am lucky in that the films I've done have not been massively successful, which means I've avoided being pigeonholed. So I can still choose the scripts I want to do.'

Some of his recent choices have proved interesting. Steven Soderbergh's deceptive comedy thriller Out of Sight, David O Russell's subversive Gulf War caper Three Kings and now the Thirties dust-bowl musical comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? He'd wanted to work with the Coen brothers for a long time. 'These guys,' he laughs. 'You never know what they're going to do but you know it's going to be worth it. There aren't many American auteurs - Soderbergh is one from time to time, the Coens definitely are. Even the stuff people don't like so much, like The Big Lebowski or The Hudsucker Proxy, are great. I was watching the trailer for The Perfect Storm and it is what it is; in America we like a little cheese in our souffl?. It's hard to sell films that are unique and different and these guys are unique and different. I admire that.'

In the Coens' comic fantasia, loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, Clooney plays Everett Ulysses McGill, a garrulous, smarmy petty criminal who escapes from a Mississippi chain gang in the company of two fellow convicts. The fugitives undertake a perilous search for buried treasure under McGill's leadership: needless to say, things do not proceed absolutely according to plan.

With his pencil moustache, fastidiously gelled hair and turbo-charged speech pattern, Clooney's character resembles nothing less than a caricaturist's version of Clark Gable, a none-too-bright conman singularly lacking self-knowledge. Tragicomic, with a dab too much charm and a repressed sense of failure, McGill is a classic Clooney creation.

This is the odd thing about Clooney; he may look like a hero but he is not cut from heroic cloth. He gives the impression of being too aware of man's fallibility, and consequently his own, to be truly convincing as a genuinely superior being. His greatest strength is in portraying weakness, the desperation beneath the charm. Which is why his most effective role to date remains Out of Sight's Jack Foley, the two-time loser thief whose surface gloss masks a painful awareness that time, life and potential for anything like happiness are fast running out. It is a singular set of attributes - more European than American - and if Clooney nurtures them wisely he might well become this millennium's answer to the similarly endowed Cary Grant.

Then, of course, there's that voice, not always as evident on screen as it is in real life. A kind of subsonic throb, it lopes across the room and puts its big furry paws around you in an aural embrace. When all's said and done, it may be the greatest weapon in his acting armoury.

Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1961. Owing to the fact that his father Nick was a TV newscaster and talk-show host, young George became familiar with television studios from an early age. A brief stint as a broadcast journalist was followed by a few years of unremarkable study at Northern Kentucky University. Having failed to get into the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, he ventured into acting when his cousin got him a small role in a feature film. In 1982, he moved to Los Angeles, where he spent a year auditioning without success, and then, at last, got a part in a movie opposite Charlie Sheen. His luck hadn't really changed, however, and the film was never released.

Clooney found bits of work in television and films throughout the late Eighties and into the Nineties - and then landed the role of Dr Doug Ross in ER. By an odd coincidence, his first steady TV part was in a medical sitcom called E/R ten years earlier, also based in Chicago.

'TV was where I learnt everything,' he says. 'In the first year of ER, Spielberg was on the set all the time. He watched a playback of a scene with Julianna Margulies and he tapped the monitor screen. He said: "If you hold your head still you'll be a star."'

His one marriage - to Talia Balsam - ended in divorce in 1992 after three years and he has subsequently claimed that he will never remarry and never have children. His most recent relationship, with French law student Celine Balitran, ended last year after she had moved from Paris to LA to be with him. Aware of the possible consequences of the split - both to her and to him should the press have chosen to spin the story - he made a generous provision for her. 'She pulled up roots and came here for me,' he explained at the time. 'So I made sure that she had a great place to live. And I made sure she had cash.'

Now he lives alone with Max, his pot-bellied pig. 'Max and I are still living together,' he confirms. 'The pig is fine. Max and I have been together for 12 years now. It's my longest relationship.'

Hollywood legend has it that Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman (who have both acted opposite him) have bet him $10,000 each that he will be a father before he turns 40. Clooney's past pronouncements on fatherhood, and the fact that he turned 39 in May, suggests that Pfeiffer and Kidman may have to stump up.

'I don't have anything in me like most people have that says you have to reproduce,' he told Playboy magazine recently. 'I will not half-ass it with children. I will not be a fairly good father. If that means not having kids, then I will not have kids.'

For the present, he has Max and a whole heap of male buddies, including his cousin Miguel Ferrer and Mark Wahlberg with whom he has developed a close professional and personal relationship. Clooney, who tends to figure in silly lists like 'America's 100 Most Eligible Bachelors' and 'Fifty Most Beautiful People in the World' and in 1997 was voted 'The Sexiest Man Alive' by People magazine, was unwise enough to make a daft remark about him and Wahlberg with the inevitable results.

If Clooney does have one distressing tendency, it is a penchant for practical jokes. This puts him in the same league of arrested adolescence as Mel Gibson - not, in my view, a Very Impressive Place to be. He has a well-documented history of 'mooning', last recorded in Cannes when he dropped his kecks and flashed his bum over the side of a yacht. Then there is the tale of an extremely elaborate practical joke he played on a friend who was staying with him involving a very small kitten, a tray of cat litter and an unfeasibly large quantity of poo. I'm sorry, you'll have to imaginethe rest. Still, at least it proves he's not perfect.

The generous soul would claim that these merry pranks may simply be his way of releasing the tension that is part of the profession. Having grown up in the company of stars - his aunt is Fifties jazz singer Rosemary Clooney and his uncle was the late actor Jos? Ferrer - Clooney is unusually aware of the uncertainties of a life in showbusiness.

'The luck I had was growing up around famous people. My uncle was a star. My aunt Rosemary was a very big star and then not. At 19 she was told she was brilliant. You're never as good as they say you are and you're never as bad. I learnt that at an early age.'

He's stopped joking now, is trying to look into himself for answers that mean something. 'The first thing is that you are just happy to get a job. And you take every job. Then you learn to be selective. I'll screw up a lot. If I was 23 and got famous, I would have been in the top of a bell tower with a high-powered rifle. I would have screwed it up really badly. Older is better as far as that goes. The downsides of fame are obvious. It would be nice to sit outside a caf? and have a coffee without being the entertainment.' He looks into the middle distance, perhaps trying to see his future. 'But the time will come when I can sit down and have a coffee and not be the entertainment. And I'll wonder why.'

Que sera sera. For the time being, let him entertain us. Just don't ask him to sing.